July 2016

Sunday 31st July 2015
Rewriting parts of Alien: Inventing the Facehugger because parts of it seem rather garbled and I'm not really sure if anyone has been able to read any of it anyway.

Friday 29th July 20161) Added: Alien: Echoes of ideas from Star Trek The Animated Series
after watching all the episodes of this cartoon series from the 1970s. I
had documented Beyond The Farthest Star a couple of months before as an
influence, but then I thought there might be more in perhaps a clever
way, ideas that might get into the viewer's head and mix with other
ideas in a very abstract way. I was thinking about where the spore and
facehugger idea came from because I'm not convinced it's simply made up
from creepy crawly ideas, but that was the way to tie it all together.2)
So indeed, I'm probably looking for a few more ideas from various
different sources aside from parasitology that ought to have inspired
the life cycle and indeed the idea behind birth temple. Not entirely
sure where the next place to look would be. Exploring beyond the
narrative presented in the interviews seems to be ideal for me because I
suppose they talk a fair amount of hogwash in these things and they're
saying things often to sell the product or sound almost entertaining
rather than give everything to the interviewer and suggest that there's
nothing more than that, and indeed a lot of things don't always come to
the surface in interviews when they're trying to follow a train of
thought. That's why we've learnt so little about Giger's work over the
years.

Tuesday 26th July 20161) There
is the idea that there are many ideas from many stories in films,
radio, comic, magazines and novels that Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett
could have been looking at, with so many small ideas come over again and
again and again from different directions and people waiting for Dan to
spill the beans were only likely to get a small amount of the
revelations coming through interviews etcetera about where his alien
story elements came from. It does seem almost sad that we only managed
to get a partial picture over the years, so I am trying to have a go
thinking about where it came from using the method of realisations I've
had about the various things that Giger was referencing in his. There
isn't much to go on or fix things together with.2) Added Creature Effects' alien mutant
which people saw in a magazine back at the time of Alien Resurrection
and assumed it was for that film. I was trying to find some information
on line about it, I wanted to post it for quite a while and then
suddenly today I found a picture of the thing on the Creature-Effect's
website and they seemed to have named it Boris. However later on in the
day, I came to assume that it was loosely based on Giger's Mordor VII
painting.

Monday 25th July 20161) I
had been looking at the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers novel the idea
day seeing how it might have been a part of the conception of the Alien
life cycle. I was wondering again where the spore idea came from and
started thinking
obviously about the spore pod from of course Invasion Of The Body
Snatchers and the word spore came up in the novel, which always seemed
to be connected in the minds of many with the pods in Alien. The idea is
to look at what influenced the alien life cycle because while it was
partially inspired by creepy crawlies, there were plenty of other things
with their roots in science fiction that in a sense were unified by the
idea of creepy crawlies. The suggestion is that creepy crawly life
cycle concept was a way to ground it and and bring forwards to the
audience the sense of something based on realism. So it brings to the
surface the idea. But the spore pod was not supposed to be an egg other
than something egg shaped. The facehugger was also considered a larval
form of the alien rather than something embryonic in an egg, even if
Ridley made it into something symbolically embryonic and Jim Cameron
decided to have an egg laying alien monster in Aliens. Rather than the
spore floating through the depths of the space as in Invasion of the
Body Snatchers floating for perhaps millions of years, it sits there
around a plinth in a birth temple waiting the countless years it has in
the Alien script waiting for a host for it to take it to another stage
in its life cycle. The spore pods from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
appeared to be plant like things and then they created reproductions of
humans, perhaps they were near enough space capsules to O'Bannon's spore
pods being time capsules.

2) The other idea I
was familiar with that came to the surface after having it having
watched Quatermass 2 about a decade ago, about the spore pod's origins
coming to the surface in my mind is the fact that Dan O'Bannon was a fan
of Nigel Kneale and his Quatermass series. In the movie Quatermass 2
there are aliens coming down to Earth in small rocket like capsules made
from stone that when humans come up to them, they suddenly crack open
and the seemingly gaseous entities inside come out, and take over the
human victims.3) I watched the film First Men In The Moon
some weeks ago and noticed that the insectoid aliens becomed cocooned
while they go into stasis for an unknown period of time

Sunday 24th July 2016
Thoughts
about the alien cocoon stage of the alien, and what it leads to, is it
an alien egg or just a cocoon pod. It's simply a cocoon pod but with the
larva having developed to a stage where it doesn't develop any more
until one day if finds a host

Thursday 21st July 20161) Added: Cocoon (1985)
as a film containing the idea of aliens disguised as humans wearing a
synthetic skin and also the rough commonality between the hibernation
pods in Cocoon and the spores in Alien

1) While
attempting to draw a J G Ballard fade with his features transformed
into biomechanoid Alien body parts, I suddenly realised that Alien
Monster IV seemed to offer solutions to the problems I was facing and
then I realised that the monster in that painting might be the face of J
G Ballard, which is the way I seem to work these days2) Added:Ben Wheatley's memories of Alien3)Added:Ben Wheatley index page

Sunday 10th July 20161) Updated the Jack Kirby
index page adding numerous additions relating to Jack Kirby, Giger and
Alien, including the story he drew about an alien Saucer Jockey
recovered from a flying saucer, which is interesting in terms of the use
of the term Jockey and we have a giant alien body. I've also included a
drawing from The Demon series, the Master Eye, elements of which have
crept into Giger's The Spell IV, which is possible because another
drawing later in the series appeared to have inspired
elements of Passage Temple and The Spell II, and so I've been focusing
on the Giger/Kirby interactions and trying to establish a timeline on
the page.2) Updated Space Jockey's origins in Swiss Family Robinson
with information about the Saucerman referred to briefly as the Saucer
Jockey. Oddly it was done the same year as Attack Of The Fifty Foot
Woman came out and that featured a giant alien humanoid pilot who
travels to earth in a giant sphere, but Kirby's giant alien pilot is
encased in a space suit that might make one think of a metal giant in
the manner of the robot Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Wednesday 6th July 20161) I
managed to finally get hold of a copy of the Weyland-Yutani Report
book. I do not really know what to make of all the various bits of
writing in it, I suppose one must consider that it's basically a book
putting onto paper Dark Horse's bible for their Alien comic book series.
Hut the idea about the mystery behind the Bishop 2's character connects
with what I have been saying about him in forum and newsgroups over the
years also it's just a creative perspective, it's okay for me to think
about him as a cyborg. A lot of hard work and enthusiasm went into the
artwork and there's a decent face-on photograph of the Deacon relief in
the ampule/head room which has been interesting to me. It's not a book
for me to criticise in terms of what it generally meant to be.2) I
managed to get hold of the new Jim Cameron interview in Famous Monsters
of Filmland. It appears as if I have a bee in my bonnet or even a flea
in my ear about people being so certain that the way Jim Cameron turned
the Alien species into an insect like race that lays big eggs as being
the most appropriate thing for the creature from alien. People might be
attracted to the simplicity of it all, and I am more interested in the
alien being incredibly alien and perhaps back in the 1970s, the idea of
something being like an insect was very interestingly alien, but making
the huge alien into something laying eggs like a giant termite queen was
just too specific, and Jim Cameron decided that the big alien spores
had to be eggs and not something slightly less explainable, although
Ridley Scott did talk about it all being related to insect life, and
wondered about the alien being like a member of an ant colony what was
going on in final egg nest in Alien, seemed much less explained although
it was generally insect enough. Looking at all the information about
the original Alien and its life cycle, there were many interesting ways
to go. Although there were other directions that Cameron could have
gone, he went for something as simple as possible that conformed with
another idea he had been working on. It worked for his movie, it's great
that any movie could have been made at all, it didn't really satisfy my
interests as a fan of the original Alien movie at the time and
Cameron's movie was made thirty years ago. However I liked his
biomechanical environments and the way an alien could pounce out of the
biomechanic wall to grab a passer by. and how the alien queen seemed to
unfold from an almost compact form . Continuing to update Aliens: Replacing the human to spore stage with the alien queen3) Added: Dali's
"Daddy Longlegs of the Evening" referenced Jean Delville's "Treasures
of Satan", and James Gleeson's "Galaxy" references both. 4) Today
I suddenly realised that Jack Kirby had incorporated elements from
Giger's Necronom IX painting so it seemed to prove that while Giger was
referencing Jack Kirby's work, Kirby referenced Giger and Giger
referenced the result in another painting, so it's almost as if seeds of
Treasures of Satan were being batted back and forth between the two of
them to get to the point where Giger painted Alien Monster IV which
works as a prominent descendent of Delville's "Treasures of Satan", and I
recognised that something of this happening between Giger and Gleeson.
It looks almost as if I'm trying to invent a secret society with Giger,
Gleeson and Kirby as members, but they might just be parts of a global
network of penpals in the artists circles all obsessed with things such
as mythology and surrealism. Some might wonder what Kirby might have
done if he had done a Alien comic book of some sort or played around
with the Prometheus film mythology, fusing it with his The Eternals
mythos.5) I took notice of the new photo of hand being
sculpted for Alien: Covenant and probably am not sure what to think of
it really. I have no idea whether it will be used either. The hands of
the original alien by Giger remain much more interesting to me.

Saturday 2nd July 20161) Added Jack Kirby references Giger's Landscape XXIX (1974) (work 249) in The Eternals #7, January 1977 ?
So it might well be that Jack Kirby was somehow aware of Giger's work,
not really sure how. In issue 7 of the Eternals, there's a panel showing
the rows of Celestials, and it looks to me as if he had take Giger's
landscape showing the babies in wheelchairs and abstractly used them as
reference for the faces of some of his Eternals. So certain faces
correspond to the babies in their positions in the images. So perhaps
they had friends in the artworld, although Jack Kirby was known for
drawing precognitive comic book stories, and then it seems to be just me
making the association in my usual way. I'll try not to wear myself out
any more thinking about it. 2) I bought Roger Christian's
book Cinema Alchemist as an ebook from Amazon and have started adding
bits and pieces of information from the various things he's talked about
to the blog. There are no photos in it. The hard copy comes out later
this month.